jfo's coding

I am back blogging at http://jfoscoding.blogspot.com/ ! See you over there!

I've been puzzling how to do this for a little while, as I had some common shortcuts I wanted to add to the desktop for everyone on my team to use. The way to do this in Windows XP has been to use the "All Users" account and add to the desktop folder...

Mark shows off some of the new and exciting features in Cider Beta 2 , including: DataSources window now works in Silverlight (as well as WPF) - you can now drag and drop from this window to your design surface to automatically hook up to data....

As larger displays are becoming more popular, they're increasingly being used in places like the livingroom. And if you've ever tried to read text across the room with the default DPI setting, you'll find you may need a pair of opera glasses. In Windows...

One of my favorite books of all time is The Pragmatic Programmer . A piece of advice I've always taken to heart is to take the time to make tools that will make you more productive. Today's tool I can share with you - I didn't want to flip back and...

I recently showed how to use the "Define a Dependency Property" snippet in VS to save time/frustration creating a new property on your control. I often need a property changed event as well, and it's a bit of a pain to go back and add it. I just figured...

If you want to make a property that can be styled from XAML - you need to create a dependency property on your control. This can be a tricky syntax, but fortunately the C#/VB editor have "snippets" that allow you to really quickly create one. Let’s...

Here's the quick way to create a custom control in Cider. Right click on project in Solution Explorer Choose “Add > New Item” Choose “Custom Control (WPF)” Two files will be generated – CustomControl1.cs and Themes\Generic...

If you’re an old windows forms or GDI/Win32 person, you may be tempted to override OnRender for more complex UIs . A long long time ago I wrote how to create a custom control in Windows Forms . I showed the technique for calling Invalidate() to call...

I’m not normally a Hungarian fanatic or anything, but it is quite easy to create “write once” layout/painting code. If there’s ever a problem with the math the code needs to be tossed out because it’s too confusing or too difficult to update. I think...

Often you can stare at a margin property "10,20,30,40" in XAML and be slightly confused as to which is which property. If I have to deal with a format over and over again I will come up with a trick to remember how to work with it. My trick is to remembering...

What is the difference between ActualSize, RenderSize, LayoutSlot? There are quite a few properties in WPF and Silverlight for layout, and it is confusing. It helps me to think of them in two separate categories – layout input properties (control layout...

...and I'm back. Well not back back in Redmond back, but back doing the things I love with great people, just at a great distance. I want to apologize for my hiatus from blogging. I have been busy at work on the next version of the Cider designer for...

In January, I'll be hanging up my keyboard for a while as I move to Australia. I have really enjoyed my work at Microsoft; particularly with my team, which is filled with smart, talented folk who really care about doing the right thing. This will be...

I've been heads down working on a project lately, and I've let a few questions build up. My apologies for this, here's what I have (if it's still useful): Updates from Everen on fixing the disabled drawing for the ever-popular SplitButton sample ....

I've been going through some older stuff, and I found a few "unpublished" works, which I'm posting for you as-is, un-edited, in all it's glory. The Painting Stages of the ToolStrip Renderer Discusses the ordering of calls to the layers of the toolstrip...

If you're a company wanting to get access to the data from the crash dialog, this article isn't for you. But this is . Also, I am not an expert in this topic. Now that that is off my chest, and we've all had fair warning, here's my scenario: I've...

And now I can be ok with it . Anyone got a protractor so I can measure off 135 degrees?

Check out the Microsoft InteropForms Toolkit 1.0 This toolkit helps you bring the power of .NET to your existing VB6 applications, by allowing them to display .NET WinForms from within the same application. Instead of upgrading the entire code base...

It looks like he's put together a very convincing VistaToolStripRenderer , and promises a tell-all series of articles. Stay tuned!

Usually such a mistake is followed by a "noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!" and quiet resignation to wait for my app to build and get to the point under the debugger where I can stop it. So here's a super-handy tip for larger projects I learned...

The answer is: October 6th .

I’ve put together a series of articles on WPF, from a Windows Forms developer perspective. This started out as a simple document entitled “So you know Windows Forms and you wanna learn Avalon” way before there was as much content out there as there is...

WPF Resources A while back, Jim posted a summary of the different types of resources in WPF. We know that from the 1.0-2.0 versions of the .Net Framework, there were basically two ways to load an image from a resource: through .resx files and by directly...

One thing we neglected to mention in the release notes is that you can now load up roots other than Window and Grid in the August CTP. The list I believe is anything deriving from Panel, Page, UserControl and ContentControl. So if you have the latest...